State of Emergency: The Way We Were, Britain 1970-1974 by Dominic Sandbrook: review

Philip Hensher relives his childhood, reviewing State of Emergency: The
Way We Were, Britain 1970-1974 by Dominic Sandbrook

By Philip Hensher

5:28PM BST 01 Oct 2010

Discussing Europe in 1973, the Daily Mirror asked its readers if they would “like to see these Common Market customs: regular wine with meals; more pavement cafés; more shops open on Sunday; coffee and roll for breakfast, not bacon and eggs; pubs open all day”.

From 2010, the period 1970-1974 is heartbreakingly remote: a world before Caffè Nero, chardonnay and croissants. I remember my mother buying the last of these in tins, though that may be a hallucination characteristic of the period.

Dominic Sandbrook is writing a series of narrative histories of Britain, from Suez to the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, of which this is the third. They make an interesting comparison with another narrative sequence currently in progress, David Kynaston’s series, which starts in 1945 and has the same projected terminal date.

Sandbrook is more revisionist in his approach. Kynaston uses a much wider variety of sources, using dozens of obscure private diaries. Both approaches have their virtues: both are blessedly free of the dead hand of nostalgia.

The short period of the Heath government, which arrived and finished unexpectedly, were the years in which contemporary life was forged. Between Harold Wilson’s Selsdon Man and Heath’s defeat by the miners, the debate about the direction of the Conservative Party was run and concluded. Thatcher triumphed shortly afterwards, and one could say that she ruled the country from 1979 to 2007.

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It is all here in embryo, as the sheikhs hiked oil prices and the leaders of the National Union of Mineworkers gave way to their wilder fantasies. Crime went from Dock Green to more modern levels, in some areas increasing by 71 per cent annually.

Innocence was being lost in other areas: it is hard not to read the complaint of the producer of the immensely successful Black and White Minstrel Show that “how anyone can read racialism into this show is beyond me” without a grim smile.

There was also the explosion of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which left the political classes bewildered and horrified. The Catholic taxi driver who observed that “there’ll be people dying in this town who’ve never f---ing died before” well conveyed the unprecedented escalations of the time.

In Sandbrook’s view, Heath was “extraordinarily, incredibly unlucky”. But he is mostly ready to see Heath’s virtues, and not only in individual episodes, such as the honourable insistence that Britain had “a moral obligation” to help Asian refugees from Amin’s Uganda. He is surely right to suggest that no government ever worked under a worse set of circumstances and, as ever, the lunatic excesses of the trade unionists have to be read to be believed.

Sir William Armstrong, the head of the Civil Service, went mad under the strain. At one point he lay “full length on the floor of Number 10 while lecturing the visiting head of the Institute of Chartered Accountants”.

Or was he mad at all? Another strain of thought in the early Seventies, under the eccentric psychiatrist R D Laing, “explained madness as the alienated reaction of a confused young man or (more typically) woman to the tyrannical repression of the family”. Laing’s general view that it was quite sane to be mad stands as an emblem of the period.

Occasionally Sandbrook gets the popular culture slightly wrong, as people do if they haven’t lived through it. The Bay City Rollers did not take the place of Marc Bolan and T Rex in popular esteem. It was fans of the Osmonds who took to the Rollers in such screaming numbers.

Curiously, too, Sandbrook says “there is no evidence of people swapping partners” at suburban parties in the period. I could introduce him to half a dozen people with clear and contrary evidence of the car keys in the fruit bowl. It certainly happened.

On the other hand, Doctor Who proves a surprisingly vivid witness to the period. Sandbrook is quite an enthusiast, given the number of references here, but he comes up with gold when he discovers a 1972 episode written as an allegorical reference to Britain’s entry into the Common Market. Popular culture – Y Viva España, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, Vesta’s Chow Mein with Crispy Noodles – is called to the witness box whenever appropriate.

Well, I was there, between the ages of five and nine, and what I chiefly remember are the wonderful sights of the last hippies, the thrilling advent of decimal coinage, the excitement of Princess Anne’s wedding, the Munich Olympics, the power cuts and, almost as thrilling, the general election of February 1974.

The period has long been written off as a dismal interlude between the liberation of the Sixties and the excesses of the Eighties. To me, it always seemed full of colour and excitement. Sandbrook, who wasn’t there, captures some, at least, of that energy and chaos.